By the numbers
At street level, the rules and The Age agree. Under the rules, buildings can cover almost every lot in the core: 97% of the High Street core’s land. The difference starts above the 11-metre street wall. At the fourth storey, the rules allow buildings on 62% of that land. The Age’s boxes cover 100%. Above 21 metres, the rules allow 12%. The Age’s boxes cover 55%.
St Georges Road is very wide, so its street wall can be up to 21 m high. As a result, the rules allow buildings on 83% of its core land at the fourth storey. In the catchment around High Street, buildings cover 67% of the land at ground level when each lot is built separately. With lots combined, they cover 68%. The Age’s volume covers all of the land, and the streets too.
These figures compare one full build-out with another. A full build-out means every lot is built to its limit. Neither is a forecast. The figures show how much of The Age’s picture comes from the rules, and how much comes from the way The Age drew it.
Floorspace, one control at a time
The Age’s render applies one control to whole lots: the height limit. The planning scheme applies many controls, lot by lot. The table adds the controls one at a time. Each row shows the floorspace left after that control and every control above it. So the amount a control takes off depends on the order.
| Core, controls added in turn | High Street (m²) | St Georges Road (m²) | Taken off, both cores (m²) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Age’s method: every lot filled to its height limit | 674,818 | 219,917 | |
| + floors too small to use left out | 674,227 | 219,843 | −666 |
| + the zone’s cap on General Residential land | 666,609 | 219,843 | −7,618 |
| + street walls and the setback above them | 591,564 | 211,661 | −83,227 |
| + side and rear setbacks | 477,851 | 196,855 | −128,519 |
| + the High Street sun test | 477,158 | 196,855 | −693 |
| + the 900 m² tower floor plate | 463,530 | 196,855 | −13,628 |
| + heritage controls: drawn to the rules | 450,409 | 194,941 | −15,035 |
Across the whole activity centre:
| Version | Both cores (km²) | Catchment (km²) | Total (km²) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Age’s method: every lot filled to its height limit | 0.89 | 6.72 | 7.61 |
| The Age’s drawing: catchment as volumes over whole zones, streets included | 0.89 | 8.81 | 9.71 |
| Drawn to the rules, lots combined | 0.66 | 4.41 | 5.07 |
| Drawn to the rules, lot by lot | 0.65 | 2.87 | 3.51 |
The Age’s method fills every lot to its height limit. That gives 7.6 km² of floorspace. Drawn to the controls’ default rules with lots combined, the figure is 5.1 km². That is 33% less. The difference is 2.5 km², about the area of 140 MCG playing fields. The Age’s drawing shows even more than its method: its inner catchment is one volume that covers streets as well as lots. Measured that way, with the outer catchment at the three storeys in The Age’s caption, the drawing comes to 9.7 km². We use the lower figure for two reasons. The Age’s caption warns that buildings may not fill their sites. And the drawing shades the outer catchment instead of showing it as a solid.
Sun and shadow
The Age’s renders show no shadows. Its caption says rules on sun, landscaping and more “cannot be shown”. They can be shown. The schedule has two sun tests. First, from 10am to 2pm on 22 September, new buildings must not shade the far footpath of High Street, measured from 5 m off the property line. Second, from 10am to 3pm on 21 June, the shortest day, new buildings should not add shadow to public parks. We calculated the shadow of every version for those hours.
Drawn to the rules, only one building fails the footpath test: the Croxton car park. Its top four floors would shade 284 m² of the far footpath at 10am. We remove those floors. After that, no site shades the far footpath at any hour. This is true lot by lot, with lots combined, and in all five potential outcomes for 2051. The test does not protect a building’s own side of the street. On that side, the rules do add shadow.
| Version | Parks, 21 June (m²·hours lost) | High St strips, 22 Sept (hours lost of 4, east / west) |
|---|---|---|
| The Age’s drawing, streets included | 77,493 | 0.97 / 1.02 |
| The Age’s boxes, lots only | 29,560 | 0.97 / 1.02 |
| Drawn to the rules, lot by lot | 11,055 | 0.56 / 0.59 |
| Drawn to the rules, lots combined | 21,345 | 0.57 / 0.62 |
| 2051, five potential outcomes | 2,040–8,061 | 0.09–0.14 / 0.13–0.21 |
One m²·hour is one square metre of park that loses one hour of sun. The parks are all land zoned for public parks within 400 m of a site in the centre. The footpath figures are the average hours of sun that each square metre of the 5-metre strip loses between 10am and 2pm. In The Age’s drawing, 62% of the park shadow comes from the parts drawn over streets. Nothing can be built on streets, so the fair comparison is with The Age’s boxes on lots only. The rules’ figures are for the default envelopes. These leave out the parapets, plant rooms and taller street-wall features that the schedule allows, so the real shadows could be larger. With the envelopes raised to the zone’s height caps, the rules take 19,627 m²·hours of sun from the parks.
The large parks, from the golf course to CERES, are too far from any new building to be shaded in any version. The rules’ park shadow falls on seven small reserves inside the catchment. There, no standard tests shadow on parks.
What our version doesn’t show
Our renders show the default: the shape a building can take without the council using its discretion. Almost every standard in the core is discretionary, so developers can ask for more, and sometimes they get it. State fast-track pathways override the overlay. Thornbury House is a seven-storey building on a site with a 21-metre limit. It was approved through a fast-track pathway before these rules began.
Lots can also be combined. Combining lets more of the land with a 27-metre limit reach eight storeys, and more catchment sites reach six. A full build-out, lot by lot or combined, does not show any real year. The five 2051 outcomes are closer to a real year. Each one is a possible result of a steady build rate, with the lots picked at random.
What The Age got right and wrong
Most of the article’s text is accurate. Its heights, its two 12-storey sites, its catchment limits and its account of Darebin Council’s submission all agree with the planning scheme. The problems are in one line of text and, mostly, in the pictures.
| The Age | The planning scheme | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Core heights: 21, 27 and 40 m (about 6, 8 and 12 storeys) | Matches the state’s height map | Accurate |
| Two 12-storey sites: Psarakos and the Croxton car park | Correct sites. But on the Croxton site 40 m is not a limit: the schedule says buildings “may exceed” it | Understates |
| “Eight storeys elsewhere, up to the junction” | Correct as a rule: 21 m on heritage sites, 27 m on others. But north of Hutton Street, heritage land is 95% of the core, not “some sites” | Misleading |
| Complying core proposals “cannot be refused” | Only for outcomes that a deemed-to-comply standard covers (council must accept those). In or next to a Heritage Overlay, which is over half the core, no standard is deemed to comply | Overstates |
| No need to advertise plans or consider objections | Core buildings and works are exempt from notice, objections and third-party review | Accurate |
| Sun, landscaping and other rules “cannot be shown” | Street walls, setbacks, the 900 m² tower limit and the sun tests are fixed numbers on fixed maps. They can be drawn, and so can their shadows | Misleading |
| Inner catchment: four storeys, six on sites of 1,000 m² | Large sites also need 20 m of street frontage | Incomplete |
| Renders: sheer boxes from footpath to roof | 11 m street wall, then 5–6 m setback; rear and side setbacks; heritage façades kept | Not to the rules |
| Renders: catchment as one solid volume | Each lot is at most 70% covered, with setbacks. Streets stay open | Not to the rules |
| Captions: buildings “may not take up entire sites”; growth over “several decades” | Both true. The images show the opposite | Accurate caveat |
Where the arguments stand
As The Age reports, Northcote is Victoria’s most marginal seat. Labor’s Kat Theophanous holds it by 184 votes over the Greens’ Campbell Gome. Labor supports the activity centre plans. It says they are gradual growth near transport. The Greens want at least half the homes in activity centres to be public, community or affordable. The Coalition has promised to scrap the program and hand decisions back to councils. Darebin Council asked for six storeys along most of High Street and ten on a few large sites. Residents’ group Fair Growth Thornbury proposed a six-storey cap on High Street and St Georges Road.
Those are real disagreements about how much Thornbury should change. They are easier to have with accurate pictures of the rules.
How the pictures were matched
For each frame of The Age’s scrolling graphic we found the camera position, direction and lens that produced it. We did this by locating street corners, building corners and the edges of The Age’s own boxes in the frame and solving for the camera, on real ground: Geoscience Australia’s 5-metre LiDAR survey, which shows High Street falling about 18 metres from the Dundas Street junction to Darebin Road. We then rendered our version from that camera at the same size. Each camera was checked independently: The Age’s boxes and our reproduction of its method line up to within 10 pixels everywhere in the frame, and usually within 5. Two views come from between the labelled stops of The Age’s scrolling video, at 1.75 and 10.9 seconds; for those we fitted the outline of The Age’s boxes or orange volume, and their outlines and ours line up to within about 3 pixels for half the outline. Their backgrounds are Google’s photo mesh; ours are state aerial photos with plain building blocks, so trees and houses look different.
Every frame The Age published uses a narrow lens, a vertical field of view of 14–16 degrees, like an 85–90 mm lens on a full-frame camera. A narrow lens from a distance flattens depth and stacks buildings together. We used the same lens for every one of our renders so the comparison is like for like.
Method and sources
Disclosure. Published by YIMBY Melbourne. The Age’s article reports YIMBY Melbourne’s criticism of Fair Growth Thornbury’s alternative maps.
The Age’s frames come from its visual story “High-rise plans at centre of fight for state’s most marginal seat” (Rachael Ward and the Visual Stories Team, 11 November 2026). We reproduce them here for criticism and review. We paraphrase its captions, with short quotations.
Controls. Darebin Planning Scheme as amended by GC270 (gazetted 31 March 2026): Clause 43.06 Built Form Overlay, Schedule 2 (High Street) and Schedule 3 (St Georges Road); Clause 32.10 Housing Choice and Transport Zone; Clauses 55 and 57. We fetched the text and maps from the state’s planning scheme service on 11 November 2026. We georeferenced the schedule maps to Vicmap parcels: that is, we lined the maps up with the official property boundaries.
Envelopes. An envelope is the largest shape a building on a site can take. Each site’s envelope meets every standard in the schedule and zone that applies to it. Outside heritage areas, that is the “deemed to comply” envelope: council must accept it for the outcomes those standards cover. In and next to Heritage Overlays, and on the Large Opportunity Site, nothing is deemed to comply, so council decides. We build the envelope one storey at a time. In the core, that is a 4.5 m ground floor, then 3.2 m floors. In the catchment, all floors are 3.2 m. The envelope includes these controls: street walls and the setbacks above them; side and rear setbacks by height; boundary walls by lot width; laneway centrelines; the sensitive interface; heritage street walls and 6 m setbacks; the 900 m² tower floor plate; the High Street sun test; and, in the catchment, the Clause 55 and 57 setbacks and 70% site coverage. We leave out townhouse floors above the ground that are under 5 m wide, because they are too narrow for a home. Where a heritage building’s height isn’t recorded, we take its street wall as two storeys. Most views build each lot separately. The floorspace view and the lots-combined catchment views combine neighbouring lots where the zone allows. These things could make real buildings bigger than shown: discretionary variations, “may exceed” provisions, combined lots and state fast-track approvals. These things could make them smaller: neighbours’ daylight and overshadowing standards, deep-soil and tree rules, and overlays we have not modelled. The project’s engine notes list every judgement call.
The Age’s method. We filled every lot over its whole area to the maximum storeys, at 3.2 m a storey, as the article states. We drew the inner and outer catchments as single volumes at four and three storeys, to match frames from The Age’s videos. In the core we drew only lots, not streets, so our version of The Age’s core is, if anything, smaller than The Age’s. The catchment volumes cover the whole zone, streets included, as in The Age’s frames.
Floorspace. Floor area is the area of every floor of every building drawn, measured to the outside walls, across both cores and both catchments. Our core envelopes use a 4.5 m ground floor and 3.2 m floors above (Table 9). This gives the same number of storeys at each height limit as The Age’s 3.2 m storeys. The envelopes leave out floors that are too small to use: floors above the street wall that are under 60 m², or under 5.5 m wide (on lots narrower than 6 m, under the lot’s average width less 0.5 m, and never under 4 m). The floorspace table shows this as its own row. The Age’s figure, 7.6 km², is its method on lots only. It leaves out the volumes that The Age’s renders draw over streets. We also measure The Age’s drawing itself. For that we use the 2026 zone boundaries, streets included, at four storeys in the inner catchment and three in the outer catchment, as The Age’s caption gives. (Its frames shade the outer catchment instead of drawing it as a solid.) The rules figure, 5.1 km², uses the default envelopes, with neighbouring lots combined where the zone allows. Lot by lot, it is 3.5 km². Every rules figure is the envelope that the default standards accept. Most standards are discretionary, so permits can approve more or less. Both figures are full build-outs, not forecasts. We take an MCG playing field as an oval 160 m by 141 m, about 1.8 hectares.
Shadows. Sun positions come from the NOAA solar calculator for Thornbury. We checked them against NREL’s Solar Position Algorithm, and they agree to within 0.01°. We use the dates and hours in the schedules’ Table 3: 22 September (10am to 2pm) and 21 June (10am to 3pm). We sweep each building along the sun’s direction from its base to its top, and add up the shadows on flat ground. “New shadow” is ground that is in shadow in a scenario but not today. A new building replaces today’s buildings on its site. Parks are land zoned Public Park and Recreation within 400 m of a site. Their names come from OpenStreetMap. The rules’ envelopes leave out the parapets, plant rooms and 3 m street-wall features that the schedule allows, so the real shadows could be larger. Today’s High Street shops are often recorded at one storey. If they are really two storeys, today’s footpaths are already more shaded, and the rules add less shadow. We did not model trees or awnings. The figures count only new shadow.
2051 scenario. We assume that each year, 0.7% of the capacity the rules still allow gets built. So each year, the unbuilt capacity is 99.3% of what it was the year before. Over 25 years, that builds about 16% of the capacity (1 − 0.993²⁵). Capacity is the net new homes that fit in the rules’ envelopes, with lots combined where the zone allows, counted area by area. Net new homes are the new homes minus the homes they replace. We estimate homes at 110 m² of floor area per apartment and 150 m² per townhouse, and take 85% of the core’s floor area as residential. Each of the five potential outcomes takes eligible lots in a random order until it reaches about the same number of homes. This way, no single set of lots is presented as the answer. In every outcome, we leave alone strata blocks, existing buildings of three storeys or more, public land and retained heritage fronts. This is a scenario, not a forecast. No official forecast exists for this centre.
Colours. By default, our new buildings use materials taken from the planning scheme and the street. Standard BF15 (Clause 43.06-7.15) asks for natural, tactile and visually interesting materials at the lower levels, durable and low-maintenance materials higher up, and finishes of low reflectivity. For the street walls, we use the red and cream brick of High Street’s existing shopfronts. In the side-by-side pictures, choose “Grey” under “Ours” to see our shapes in grey. Choose “Our grey” or “Our colours” under “The Age” to see The Age’s boxes drawn by our renderer. Under “Lots built”, “Full core” is every core lot built to the rules at once, and “All developments” adds every lot in the catchments, each built on its own, without combining lots. “Random sample” is one version of 2051: potential outcome 3 of the five in the walk-through. With “Random sample”, “Grey” draws the new buildings in teal, so they stand out from the buildings there now (the option reads “Grey, new in teal”). In “Colours”, they look like any other building.
Data. Aerial imagery, parcels, zones and overlays: Vicmap (State of Victoria, CC BY 4.0). Ground heights: Geoscience Australia 5 m LiDAR DEM (CC BY 4.0). Building footprints and heights: Overture Maps Foundation (Microsoft ML Buildings, OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL). Heights of existing shops on High Street are often unknown, so we draw them at one storey. This understates today’s two-storey shopfronts.